Comment:

In Star Trek TNG, transporters were used to create duplicates of one human. In Voyager, the transporter was used to combine two people together, creating a new individual with the traits of both. In Lower Decks, both of these effects were shown to be reproducible.

I can understand why they didn't, but I do think the showrunners didn't delve quite deeply enough into the implications of these technologies. What happens when some narcissist decides to make a few million of themself?

Transcript:

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0413– 2167/07/07/12:18 - Rosenthal College, Delta building, classroom 0109
HA: What would “robot rights” be, exactly? Right to recharge? Right to back up your data?
CP: I d-don’t know, my Grok isn’t… it’s having t-trouble sticking to the narrative we’ve established.
JB: That’s one of the issues with the modern “AI rights” movement – what rights are analogous to human rights, and is it practical (or even possible) to extend them to any sufficiently self-aware computer program?
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JB: Take having kids, for example: humans who are deemed to be competent adults can produce and raise as many children as they like, because there’s an upper biological limit – even if you’re obsessive about it, you likely won’t have more than a dozen babies in your lifetime.
JB: Over the course of human history, we’ve learned that this is a right that has to be upheld, because the alternative is effectively genocide. It’s really just an extension of the right to bodily autonomy.
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JB: For an AI, however, forking or duplicating its code is just a matter of hardware. Any AI, with access to enough server space, could make a million copies of itself instantaneously – and they’d all, presumably, also be “adults” with the same rights from the word go.
HA: ...but is that really reproduction, or is that just making backups of one thing?
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JB: Exactly. It’s not one-to-one with a human experience, so we can’t necessarily port everything over, even if we wanted to.
CP: Apparently, robots in Grok’s version of twenty-one sixty-seven, when robots have taken over everything… robots have a right to “life, liberty, and the p-pursuit of happiness”.
CP: And what makes the robots h-happy is “using armies of drones to hunt the last few surviving humans through the irradiated wasteland”, so that’s… that’s not ideal.
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